Pun Salad

So it's Hulk vs. Thor! Also, Storm!

(Respectively: Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Halle Berry.)

This movie was based on a Don Winslow novella, included in his collection of shorter works, Broken (which I liked). On the outer surface it's pretty clichéd: Davis, a very talented thief (Hemsworth), is looking to make One Final Score, but Lou, a diligent cop (Ruffalo), has picked up on his modus operandi: no harm done to his victims, targeting sites with easy access to California Highway 101. Complications ensue for everyone: Davis acquires a sorta-girlfriend who's unaware of his profession; he enlists the aid of an insurance broker (Berry) who's bitter about being passed over for promotion; he gets betrayed by his longtime mentor (whoa, Nick Nolte has seen better days) and tormented, as a result, by a violent psycho. Meanwhile, Lou is getting a lot of pushback from his corrupt cop superiors and cop co-workers.

The cinematography is very splashy. Very Michael Mann-ish. It has to be very splashy for me to notice. I'm surprised it didn't get an Oscar nomination for that, at least.

And it's kind of long: 2⅓ hours. Still, I stayed awake, which is unusual for me at home on the sofa.

An increasingly rare thing for me: going out to watch a movie in a theater. But Pun Son and I managed to head down to Newington (NH) to see this blockbuster. As I type, IMDB raters put it at position #78 on the top 250 movies of all time. Ahead of Toy Story?! I don't know about that, but I had a good time.

As in the book, Rylan Grace wakes up amnesiac, not even knowing his own name, let alone his situation. But he's very alone, save for two dessicated corpses he discovers early on. (One of them being Lily from those old AT&T commercials, but don't worry, Milana Vayntrub fans, she shows up in flashbacks.)

Grace gradually recovers his memory, and (spoilers ahead) also his purpose: against all odds, find out why a deadly menace is eating the Earth's sun, and come up with a fix that will save the world. Unexpected help arrives from Epsilon Eridani.

A good word for Ryan Gosling, who plays "everyman" Grace with grace.

I've had a very poor movie-watching record so far this year. Part of the problem: I don't report on movies if I fell asleep while watching them. And that happens a lot; I even nodded off in the movie theater during 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

But I can report that I stayed awake all the way through Song Sung Blue. And I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's the based-on-truth story of Mike and Claire Sardina, starting from their meet-cute while performing their tribute-band songs at the Wisconsin State Fair. They discover their true chemistry in the songs of Neil Diamond. And eventually build a fan following in the Milwaukee area. Until…

Well, no spoilers here. But I went into the movie not really knowing the details, and there's some bad stuff I didn't see coming. (And, sadly, neither does Claire.) But it wouldn't be a very interesting movie without some of that.

Hugh Jackman plays Mike, Kate Hudson plays Claire, and they are both great. (Ms. Hudson snagged a Best Actress Oscar nomination, well-deserved.) And, hey, that's Jim Belushi!

(For what it's worth: I am definitely going to see Project Hail Mary on the big screen. And I will try again to watch The Bone Temple when it shows up on Netflix.)

I was inspired to watch this via a short clip seen on some social media site. Cary Grant! Ingrid Bergman! What could go wrong there? I even watched it without reading the synopsis at Amazon. (And it's a good thing, too, because it contains a major spoiler.) IMDB claims it's a comedy, but it's one of those comedies that isn't actually funny. (And I'm easily amused!)

Ms Bergman plays Anna Kalman, famous actress. We know she's famous because wherever she goes out in public, she's hounded for her autograph. She is, unfortunately, bored with her career. And, although she's single, she's uninterested in the efforts of her sister to set her up with suitably eligible suitors.

Ah, but then Cary Grant shows up. Sparks fly! He's a rich American, in line for a prestigious job at NATO. Fate throws them together! Pretty soom they are canoodling. And (see the title) they are not that discreet about it. One big problem: Cary says he's married, albeit separated, and divorce is out of the question.

The movie is based on a stage play, and it shows. There's a lot of costumery involved for Ms. Bergman. It was made in 1958, and I suppose part of the comedic content for audiences of the day was based on the way the film clearly implies adulterous behavior without spelling it out.

This is (duh) a sequel to Nobody, which I watched and liked back in 2023. Bob Odenkirk stars again (spoiler for the first movie: he survives), and he's great. It is billed as a "dark comedy", where the darkness is provided with copious violence, bad language, and threats against the innocent. So, if you're OK with that…

The events of the previous movie have given Hutch (Bob) a promotion of sorts: he's now a professional assassin, working to pay off multi-millions in debt, thanks to his rash (but understandable) decision to burn up a large pile of mob cash. (It made sense at the time. You really should watch that first movie before this one.)

But it's a tiresome life, and Hutch has been neglecting his family. He demands a break for a family vacation, and chooses "Plummerville", a cheesy, decrepit town he remembers from his youth. It's got rides, a water park, an arcade, duck boats, … and (oh yeah) loads of corruption and organized crime; he wasn't aware of that last bit. But Hutch is a Jack Reacher-style character; trouble and (eventually apocalyptic) violence seem to find him wherever he goes.

I had to look over to IMDB to find the name of the actress playing the primary villain here. And said, "Oh. Wow."

Pun Son wanted to see Nuremburg! (He's kind of into WWII stuff.) So we trundled down to the Regal Cinemaplex in Newington Sunday night for the 8:15 showing, and … we were the only ones in the theater. The parking log was crowded though, thanks to the new Wicked movie.

Cynical observation: When it comes to actual wickedness, I guess there's not so much interest in movies about that.

It is, pretty clearly, Oscar-bait. I'm not sure how the "Best Actor" nomination will play out. Will both Russell Crowe (who plays Hermann Göring) and Rami Malek (who plays his shrink, Douglas Kelley) get nods? Will they then split the vote, allowing some mere mortal to take home the statuette? I'd say Michael Shannon (playing prosecutor Robert H. Jackson) is a lock for Best Supporting Actor, even though he goes through the movie with a single semi-scowl expression.

Also good: John Slattery as Colonel Burton C. Andrus, commandant of the Nuremburg prison and Leo Woodall, an occasional translator between Kelley and Göring, who's hiding a secret past.

It's very long, just a couple minutes short of 2.5 hours. And, if you want to know why I'm concentrating on the actors, most of that time seems to be those actors talking to each other. I may have nodded off for a bit in the middle.

The movie emphasizes how ordinary Germans (like Göring) got enraptured by the charismatic Hitler. At the end, spoiler alert, Kelley is shown as a depressed drunk, given to loudly, but futilely, warning fellow Americans that it would be a mistake to think It Can't Happen Here. Are we supposed to draw parallels between the Adolph and the Donald? I'd guess that wasn't far from the filmmakers' minds.

I loved the old Police Squad TV show. It only lasted for six episodes in 1982.

I watched the resulting movie series with Leslie Nielsen, in 1988, 1991, and 1994. My recollection: generally OK, but not as good.

And the latest installment in the resulting movie series was free-to-me on Paramount+, my Saturday night was free, so …

Well, the comedy dropoff continues. There's a lot of mugging for the camera. (One great thing about the TV show: Leslie Nielsen and Alan North were just about always deadpan.) There's a lot of absurdity that seldom manages to be actually funny. The best jokes are the ones stolen from the previous entries.

Anyway: Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin, Junior, trying to follow in Dad's footsteps. He's a parody of a cop who doesn't play by the rules, shooting first, asking (no) questions later, which puts him constantly at odds with his superiors. His billionaire antagonist, Richard Cane, is hatching a scheme to loose violent anarchy upon the nation, aided by a gadget named "Primitive Online Transmission", or a P.L.O.T device. (That actually got a grin from me.)

Pamela Anderson plays the love interest, who also is seeking revenge for her dead brother, sent to his doom by Cane. She's better than I would have expected!

Well, I thought I was going to like this better. I read and enjoyed the Parker novels by "Richard Stark" (Donald Westlake pseudonym). The previous Parker movies (with, variously, Lee Marvin, Mel Gibson, Robert Duvall, …) have been uneven, but good enough so I was willing to take a chance on this one. Shane Black wrote and directed, and he's done good stuff in the past.

Mark Wahlberg plays Parker here. For those who don't know: he's a thief, operating under his own not-particularly-moral code of ethics. This requires him, occasionally, to hook up with a crew of fellow thieves. Among which, according to that saying, honor is lacking. The opening heist demonstrates that, as most of the team is betrayed and murdered by … no spoilers here.

But this sets Parker on a quest for revenge and retribution. Which turns into an unlikely, and unlikeable, Ocean's 11-style caper, but with ultraviolence, chase scenes, and a lot more bad words (well, just multiple repetitions of one bad word). It's very formulaic, and I kept dozing off.

Worst of all: the script turns Parker into kind of a wisecracker. That's not faithful to the books. In fact, this has the feel of a previously-existing script that someone demanded be turned into a Parker movie, and that was accomplished grudgingly, in a slapdash fashion.

Co-written and directed by Ethan Coen, half of the genius behind The Big Lebowski, Fargo, Blood Simple, etc.! What could go wrong? Especially since it's free-to-me on Peacock?

Well, I liked it OK, but only because I've inured myself to tolerate all the stuff you can read about in the IMDB "Parent's Guide". (Not everyone has the same attitude, the critics at Rotten Tomatoes are pretty brutal.)

Honey O'Donahue (Margaret Qualley) is a private eye out in Bakersfield. Things kick off when a prospective client, Mia Novotny, is found dead from an apparent auto accident, her car busting through the guardrails on a lonely desert road. But Honey had promised to help Mia, so she feels duty calls on her to do at least a perfunctory investigation.

Which opens a can of worms. For example, Honey's led to the "Four-Way Church", run by a charismatic priest (Chris Evans), who's quickly revealed to be sleazy in multiple ways. (A total inversion of Captain America.) She makes the acquaintance of MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), a cop who manages the evidence room, and… that relationship develops pretty quickly.

Honey utters some very good lines that made me smile, straight out of the hard-boiled shamus handbook. The plot is twisty. (I had a lot of "I didn't see that coming" moments.) Things get personal when (near the end) Honey's niece goes missing. Given all the other bodies that have piled up at that point (this YouTuber counts eight in all) , Honey's more than slightly concerned.

Now, of course, I have that old Carl Perkins song stuck in my head.

So a long Friday night stretched ahead of me with a cheap Domino's pizza working its way through my alimentary canal… Hey, why not watch this year's Superman movie?

So I did, and it wasn't bad. It does some violence to the Supercanon I grew up with, but I can live with that.

It begins not with the usual origin story, but the aftermath of Superman getting badly defeated by the "Hammer of Boravia", an enemy motivated by Superman's previous intervention in Boravia's invasion of the poor, defenseless country of Jarhanpur. Luckily, super-dog Krypto saves Superman, dragging him (literally) to the Fortress of Solitude, where a small team of robots brings him back to health.

It's quickly revealed that villainous Lex Luthor is behind the scenes, and all this is merely a small element in his overall scheme to discredit and destroy the Man of Steel. And (as usual) gain enormous wealth and power.

It's fun. Just a few notes.

(1) One of the plot points involves Superman's DNA. Which made me wonder biologically: he's an alien from the doomed planet of Krypton, and he's got DNA?

(2) Pa Kent has a small but pivotal role, and he is played as an extraordinarily decent sort by Pruitt Taylor Vince. Ironically, Vince played one of the more evil bad guys in an episode of Justified, Glen Fogle. (Whose fate was memorably kind of amusing.)

(3) Nathan Filion plays Green Lantern, amusingly, as kind of a jerk. Hey, I've liked him since Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, a fun TV series that also launched the career of a guy named Ryan Reynolds.